Child of Dreams
by AvatarWho
Summary: Rake, an old minder meets with Skulduggery and Stephanie to discuss a strange mind message that he received just hours after a man he was looking after was taking by a mysterious dark figure with glasses. Finding this one is going to be a real nightmare. {Set after Last Stand of Dead Men}


Chapter 1: Hope and Bone

A wrethched cur was swindling in the next room. Rake could feel the firghtful darkness curl around his skull, digging deeper and deeper. His ears were pierced by a sollen cry. He rised from his wooden bed and stammered around his room looking for his spectacles. His walls were pastly white with splotches of dirt and grime. Mold started to creep up onto the walls, creating dark patches all over the ceiling. The door was jammed but with brute force, the door creacked open and out came Rake, shuffling toawrds a slightly bigger more... unresting door. With a heaving push, he entered to see a figure contorted backwards amd forwards, bones that went in and out, of which resembled waves of cartilage. This figure was bald and had wrinkles that could have told stories of the days of the very old for hours and hours. Rake picked up a half empty bottle of water and suffled towards the broken figure. The broken man grumbled, trying to communicate through his twisted teeth and jaw that went in the oposite direction.

"Shut up," Rake raved, "you're getting you're water," a series of gurlgles and mild chocking pursude with a slightly pained expression on the figures face,

"If you don't want water then what do you want?" Thrashing and muffled screaming was happening all at once, limbs that did not so much as wiggle, started to bend backwards and forwards, cracks and creaks were heard from all directions as the body started to allign into a normal shape. The man started to rise up into the air, unconscious from all the pain that he has experience. A dark figure stepped out of the shadows behind the chair. He was tall and menacing with brod shoulders, but wore glasses. Rake found this odd, he wouldn't have guessed that tall creatures that could levitate bodies would need corrective lenses.

"Who are you?" Rake stammered out. The dark figure stared at him intensely, as if Rakes soul was being analysed. The dark figure reached his hand out towards Rake, he flinched and covered his face. The dark figure responded by lifting Rake up and placing his arms by his side. He reached out and took Rake's glasses.

He tapped Rake's forhead and dissapeared into the shadows behind the big chair. Rake stood there, shaking, touching his head of which the dark man touched his head. He felt cold. Much more colder than any other day looking after that old bastard that had landed on his lap years ago.

"I never really liked him anyway," snivelled Rake who proceeded to return back to his quarters. He decided to report this incident to his superiors tomorrow, of course after he changed his trousers.

A bang of thunder rang around the decreped house. Lightning sprang in forks onto the ground below, leaving an almost singed smell. A faint and fast patter could be heard, throdding along the fields of grass with a heavy breathe that exammered exhaustion. A little girl with plaits running down both sides of her head, that were now bobbing up and down. She was wearing a skirt with sewn on patches that had traces of both mud and tears, both of her shoes were not on her feet, with only muddy socks with rips and tears. She had outgrew them by two years. The girl jumped into a ditch and covered herself with shrubbery in an attempt to hide from the thing that was chasing her. The night air was dead, and the only sound that was present, was the frigthened breathe of the girl. Her eyes darted from left to right hand clutching at the bushes and twigs that kept her hidden, wishing for all the evil in the world to vanish just for one minute so she could get a head start. Light footsteps were heard walking along the ditch, a large branch was being dragged behind the footsteps. She could hear him, walking back and forth, it left her wondering if he knew where she was, and was just playing a game with her, as he had done many times before. She wanted to peak, just to move one piece of twig or bush and just see where he was looking, exactly where he was looking. Her eyes were then firmly shut as a way to ensure her curiosity did not result in her re-capture. She started thinking of her home, a home so far away that was cold and damp but safe. She thought of her mother, cooking a chicken from the farm, her father eating eggs before doing work as the farmers hand and her sister, practising the fiddle, constanly playing 'Dirty Old Town' as that was the only song that she knew. The girl remembered so much from her small time in the house. But there was another person there now, he looked old and worn. He shuffled around wearing a jumper with holes and her fathers old trousers in her room. Suddenly the paint on the walls started to chip away and the wooden bed frames did not have a mattress or a pillow to it's name. She saw a contored man, with limbs that were in knots and with a crooked jaw. A dark figure was seen taking the contorted man away, and she suddenly gasped. He was in her home. He might know where the rest of them are. Fear shot accross her face as she realised that she made a noise, of which attracted a set of light footsteps to walk in her direction. A tear trickled down her face and with one last cry for help she sent a message to the man who slept in her bed, begging him to recieve it.

Rake suddenly rose up from his bed and proceeded to writhe on the floor with pain. He was experiencing the worst pain that he would ever feel. Knives were shooting into his skull, his eyes simultaneously growing and shrinking, his ears hearing a constant ringing that gushed blood all over the floor. A voice rang through his head, "Contact a man of hope and bone, or else I will be forvever alone." Rake stood up from the floor and had a sudden urge to walk Roarhaven and talk with man made of hope and bone.


End file.
